The funny bit is that he probably said it in jest but out loud in front of four very wealthy customers so rather than cheapening out he paid up and ended up cementing our relationship in trust. Jan is an absolutely awesome guy, I learned more about telecommunications from him than from the CCITT books. His knowledge is literally encyclopedic, even today he's current on the state of the art.
Jan single-handedly designed and implemented a clustered system that would scale horizontally to insane volumes of messages (faxes and telexes) and he did that with early 80's technology.
Even today, with our current tech you'd be hard pressed to create a system that is as elegant as what he put together, he's both an awesome teacher and a good friend.
Jans desktop was for the time pretty powerful, there were quite a few servers there as well (> 30).
The machines were mostly powered by 486/33, on a micronics motherboard, adaptec controllers (1542) to hook up drives.
Using the 286 version of QnX, all the joys of 'mixed model' programming. QnX took forever to release their 32 bit version (this was the main reason I wrote a clone).
Funny that I still remember those details after all these years.
The funny bit is that he probably said it in jest but out loud in front of four very wealthy customers so rather than cheapening out he paid up and ended up cementing our relationship in trust. Jan is an absolutely awesome guy, I learned more about telecommunications from him than from the CCITT books. His knowledge is literally encyclopedic, even today he's current on the state of the art.
Jan single-handedly designed and implemented a clustered system that would scale horizontally to insane volumes of messages (faxes and telexes) and he did that with early 80's technology.
Even today, with our current tech you'd be hard pressed to create a system that is as elegant as what he put together, he's both an awesome teacher and a good friend.